


shiva

by slybrunette



Category: Weeds
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 12:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post 8x02 'a beam of sunshine'. this is a story about mourning dead long before they're gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shiva

He says _you can’t go_ , he says _the girls can’t go_ , rutting up against her in a dirty bathroom stall, and Jill isn’t hearing him, not really, she’s hearing dollar signs and her marriage finally falling through the cracks, but she’s saying all the right things and she’s moving all the right ways and, christ, he’s almost to the point where that’s enough, where he can settle for _close enough_ and not flinch when he looks at himself in the mirror, he’s almost almost _almost_ \--

“Yeah, yeah, that’s so good, babe,” she says and then smears her mouth against his, swallowing a dozen variations on the same idea _don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t leave me_ , things she won’t hear, and that’s okay, really, because it’s a sentiment that was never intended for her in the first place.

 

 

 

 

This is a story about mourning the dead long before they’re gone.

 

 

 

 

“Let me see a smile, Andy,” she says, her lips curved and her teeth showing, and he can’t remember the last time she smiled that wide, can’t remember a time before croquet mallets and burned-out neighborhoods, can’t remember the woman who used to sit on the sidelines at soccer games and attend PTA meetings religiously any more than he can remember his brother’s face outside of photographs -- eight years is a long fucking time and, yet, not very long at all, a fifth of his life that’s probably already half over, but there are things you aren’t ever supposed to forget and what does it say about him, exactly, that he can remember the warmth of her hands grasping his on a bench in RenMar but needs a visual aid before he can confidently say yes, his eyes were brown, and no, he wasn’t going gray, not even around the temples, he didn’t live long enough for that.

He tries for a smile but it’s weak.

“You tried,” she says, and pats him on the head with the same fondness one reserves for a favored pet. “At least you tried.”

 

 

 

 

He packs lunches and unpacks suitcases, mimics stability, and he’s not very good at this, which is to say that he’s great at going through all the motions of it, has more experience raising dysfunctional children than he knows what to do with, but he’s not so great at actually wanting it, at convincing himself that raising the children of another Price sister is how he wants to spend the next decade.

There is a kid out there somewhere, one with half of his genes, and a mother who never saw a point in telling him, and that thought should burn, it should make him feel something, because he’s always wanted the wife and the kids and the white picket suburbia wonderland for all his fucking around, banging crazy chicks who stab him over spirit animals and get him kicked out of entire states, he’s always wanted that, but maybe his time has passed or maybe he doesn’t really know what the hell he wants because Maxeen is nothing but a hazy half-remembered three weeks and he won’t ever try to call her, has grown up enough to understand that it was her choice to make and maybe she was trying to save him some heartache in the process.

It goes the way of Copenhagen, bedtime stories designed to provide a light at the end of the tunnel, ideas that were better off in his head, plans to cling to in the absence of anything concrete. There was always Copenhagen before he spent three years trying to hack it only to wind up stateside again. There was always the life he’d start once he finally walked out on her before he realized the only thing that could ever tear him from her side was a .22 caliber bullet. Now there’s twin terrors and a ghost that occupies the bedroom across the hall from his and the only thing he has left to want is out of reach.

 

 

 

 

It took her a week after she first woke up to string together the two syllables that make up his name and even then she kept choking on it.

 

 

 

 

She keeps splitting things into _before_ and _after_ like everyone else has changed right along with her, like she expects them to continue revolving around her instead of evolving away, and that, at least, has not changed.

Silas still deals and Shane still plays his cards too close to the chest. Jill still hates her guts and envies her life, scars and all. Nancy just spouts inspirational phrases that don’t belong anywhere but inside a fortune cookie and tells everyone to keep their chin up and their hands clean, and every now and then she’ll flinch when she finds the eyes staring back at her are devoid of both emotion and recognition, like she can’t quite understand what she’s doing wrong.

They say these things take time.

He goes to sleep with a ticking clock next to his head and a woman he doesn’t love, will never love, by his side.

 

 

 

 

“You stopped visiting,” she says, once.

“Yeah, I know. I just -- I got busy.”

He has never been too busy for her. It’s not a concept she can process. “With what?”

“Life,” he lies. “Living life. You know, carpe diem and all that.”

She blinks and he expects retribution but that is the old Nancy, the Before Nancy, and he hasn’t yet broken the habit of expecting one where he’s sure to get the other.

After Nancy just says “I missed you” a little too sadly for him to be able to take.

 

 

 

 

Some days, he thinks it wasn’t that he stopped wanting those things he’d always dreamed about so much as he stopped wanting any version of the future that didn’t include her.

Most days, he knows.

 

 

 

 

_You tried_ , she’d said, that wide smile.

He’d had to excuse himself from the room, afterwards, and failed to return for days.

 

 

 

 

_Nobody can go_ , he says -- his voice cracks, it cracks, _he_ cracks -- and scrambles for purchase where he isn’t likely to find it. 

 

 

_fin._


End file.
